FF9 kills 6 and thats my opinion.

Well I cant take you seriously anymore.

man, what? FF9 is clearly still better than all the FFs that have come after it and personally its one of my favourite due to its battle system of collecting skills through weapons.

9 is really fun imo but 6 still tops the list. I cant take 7 seriously since that DoC trash.

I have a friend that likes 9 almost as much as he does 7, and I have another friend that loves 8 more than any other final fantasy. I can almost respect the series for diverging just enough to appeal to people with different sensibilities for different reasons, but I could never really understand how it works due to the biases that keep me completely separate from most of those games. I reckon it has a whole bunch to do with the order you are exposed to the games in terms of just what you get out of them.

I would probably play 9 before I play 8, but am wholly unfamiliar with either one with exception to the things I hear offhand about them (I do remember renting 9 a long time ago, but I reckon I wasn't into it enough to want to buy it, much less play it all the way through) As it stands right now, I'm rather glad I stopped at 6 and didn't play another one for that long until 12 came out.

I figure by playing every 6th game in the series I'm not missing out on that much. I personally can't wait for Final Fantasy 18 to come out because I am sure it will kick all sorts of ass.

Second was the damn enemies leveled up with you.  I hate that in RPGs.  I like to feel like I've accomplished something for all my time spent leveling up. 

No matter how you look at it, you haven't.

FFVI was the epitome of the series, and it all progressively declined after that.

i think it had a lot to do with translating the series on to a more advanced hardware platform. Part of the whole reason final fantasy was designed the way it was is due to limitations of the technology it was being played on which meant a big part of the game was the suspension of disbelief and the player's imagination.

as the hardware became a bit more sophisticated, the industry grew, and marketing became a bigger factor in the design of these games, the whole concept of the original FF games of being basically a playable fantasy novel changed to being a 3d anime

man, what? FF9 is clearly still better than all the FFs that have come after it

this is kinda like saying dysentery is better than the bubonic plague

the whole concept of the original FF games of being basically a playable fantasy novel changed to being a 3d anime

Nailed it. That's a great way to put it.

What Dietcoke has said is probably the best way to describe the series progression. I wholeheartedly agree.

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man, what? FF9 is clearly still better than all the FFs that have come after it

this is kinda like saying dysentery is better than the bubonic plague

ahhhaha. ahhaha i didn't notice what he said exactly before you pointed out.
also hundley becopme shocked: somebody in this topic pointed out that FF8 had relatively interesting setting and when i thought about it for a second, yeah it does. it has better settings and better use of them than ff7. also this is sort of tricky but if you forget squal the characters were sort of better written than in ff7. no fuck that let's just say i'd rather care about even of the some of the lesser characters of FF8 rather than that badly written fucking cat of FF7. 7 had bad sidecharacters. aaaaaaaaa i can't decice in general i think the characters of ff7 blew. other than this i agree what you said about ff7.

what I meant was that people were slamming FF9 just as much (maybe more) as the ones that have come after it when it is clearly superior. The main gripe I can see is that people didn't like the idea that it was set in medieval times again and that Zidane was annoying. Am I the only one who was happy that FF9 didn't feature another dark, mysterious and misunderstood character to unfold the story once again? Becuase lets be honest, the story is always the same, the only thing that really changes are the characters, setting and atmosphere. I dunno, I thought it was kinda cool for a change to make it more light hearted (like FF5) and reimagine some of the elements that made up the old FFs

i would have enjoyed final fantasy 9 if the best word to describe the game wasn't VAPID. final fantasy 7&8 at least attempted to convey some interesting ideas and, at times, managed to do it rather well. then final fantasy 9 comes around and aims for an age demographic ten years behind the previous two games. the story is so flat and idiotic that it's really impossible to focus on any of the finer elements of the game. i tried playing final fantasy 9 again somewhat recently, to see if i missed something or if i was too hard on it the first time, and i couldn't get an hour into it. it's just a really fucking dumb game. i ended up throwing the controller down, instead spending the night drinking heavily and swearing loudly so the neighbors could hear.

whether or not final fantasy 7&8 are actually good games is open to debate, but at least they aspired to do greater things than the typical idiotic rpg. who the fuck makes a game about violent ecoterrorism and actually conveys it as a good thing?!? i don't fucking care how bad the translation is, or how stiff and unconvincing the characters are, that's an exceedingly brave thing to do. not a lot of people are hyper about final fantasy 8, but this was a game about a kid with social anxiety disorder and extreme introversion. i'm not saying it was done all that well, and squall is a rather obnoxious character most of the time, but this was a pretty excellent idea, especially conveying a significant percentage of squall's persona through what was effectively an interior monologue. lots of elements of final fantasy 8 were really deliberately backwards and it made for, if nothing else, a pretty unique experience with vivid, realistic characters.

final fantasy 9 aspired to do absolutely nothing except re-integrate the brand into a pre-teen audience. it's the reason why the series is absolute shit right now, because it removed any sort of obligation to make the games about something worthwhile, or to do anything against the grain with them. there were a lot of very interesting rpgs for the first playstation, but final fantasy 9 is like this enormous stick in the mud that refuses to do anything unique and just leeches off of prior games without developing a brain of its own. in the other final fantasy games, the FINAL FANTASY STANDARDS like chocobos and jawa-ripoff black mages and all that shit are just peripheral elements to give the games color and to tie the series together. in final fantasy 9, pretty much all they did was accumulate as many of those stupid, tired final fantasy standards as possible and do nothing else of merit in the game.